AARP: 10,000 recent vets rely on parents' care

If you really "Support Our Troops," then you should be calling your Congressmen demanding increased federal spending on medical care for returning vets. Damn the cost. Our wounded heroes shouldn't have to rely on charity, or their parents in retirement, in order to survive. They shouldn't have to fight the Pentagon or VA bureaucracy. Our government should be bending over backwards to serve them.


When Wounded Vets Come Home

As more troops than ever are surviving the fearsome injuries of war, parents are increasingly being thrust into the role of long-term caregivers

By Barry Yeoman
July - August 2008 | AARPmagazine.org

[Excerpt:]

At that moment, Cynthia became one of a growing number of parents who are, by necessity, stepping back into the role of caregiver for their children who are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating and often long-term injuries. According to officials from three national organizations—the Wounded Warrior Project, The Military Family Network, and the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes— an estimated 10,000 recent veterans of these conflicts now depend on their parents for their care. Working unheralded, these parents have quit jobs, shelved retirement plans, and relocated so they can be with their injured sons and daughters. Many have become warriors themselves, fighting to make sure this new wave of injured veterans gets the medical care and rehabilitation it needs.

These parent caregivers, many of them boomers and some older, face a 21st-century challenge: their children are coming home in unprecedented numbers with injuries that would have been fatal during earlier conflicts. "This is a war of disability, not a war of deaths," says former Army physician Ronald Glasser, M.D., author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq (George Braziller, 2006). "Its legacy is the orthopedics and neurology wards, not the cemetery." Not only have better helmets and body armor saved lives, but battlefield medicine now borders on miraculous. Someone arriving at the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq, has a 96 percent chance of survival. He or she can sometimes be stateside within 36 hours of the injury. As a result, there are just 6 deaths for every 100 injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 28 deaths per 100 in Vietnam, and 38 in World War II, according to Linda Bilmes, a researcher at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

If this survival rate is heartening, the flip side is that many of these injuries are fearsome and require extended and complicated care. Part of the reason is that the nature of warfare has changed: today's troops face a constant threat of IEDs. When these makeshift bombs detonate, they throw off pressure waves so intense that bystanders' brains literally bang around in their skulls. "These are enormous explosions," says Glasser. "The physics are astonishing—they will turn over a 70-ton tank. Anyone caught in the blast wave is going to be in trouble." Sometimes injured brain tissue swells so dramatically that part of the skull must be removed to let the brain expand.

As of April 29 the Pentagon counted 31,848 wounded service members in the current conflicts. Independent experts say that is a conservative figure. They estimate the number of brain injuries alone might total 320,000, or 20 percent of the 1.64 million who have served so far—a number that S. Ward Casscells, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, calls "plausible." In addition to the physical injuries, there are thousands of cases of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Last year military screeners detected psychological symptoms in 31 percent of Marines, 38 percent of soldiers, and 49 percent of National Guardsmen returning from war.